Hassad might be one of the leaders of this gang, Porter told himself, but he’d seen these boys in action. Everything was sacrificed to the cause.

And everybody.

If they thought he was pissing off with their hostage, they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him.

And the hostage.

‘I’m bailing out,’ snapped Porter. ‘Keep driving.’

Before Hassad had a chance to reply, Porter had flung open the door on the Polo. As it ripped through the air, Porter curled himself into a ball and kicked back with his legs. Hitting the ground with a heavy thump, a hundred bolts of pain started shooting up through his spine as his back absorbed the impact of the fall. It was only a couple of feet from the Polo’s passenger seat to the dirt track they were driving down, but it felt like at least a hundred. He rolled, keeping his body as curved as possible to smooth the landing, but he was still moving fast over the ground, his naked back taking a dozen different cuts and bruises from the pebbles littering the path.

He could hear a horrible crunching sound where his ankle hit a stone, and prayed to God it wasn’t broken.

No time to worry about it now, he told himself.

I could be dead before the next five seconds are up.

The AK-47 was still in his right hand. Porter rolled to his feet, steadied himself by the side of the road, then whipped the gun into his fists. The Polo was still moving away down the side of the hill, and in its wake, the motorbike was accelerating fast: a Honda, Porter noted, with at least a onelitre engine, the machine should be able to reach eighty or ninety on a track like this, and it was probably hitting those speeds now. He gripped the AK-47 tight in his hands, his fingers closing down on the trigger. The bike was close now, but amid the dust kicked up in the Polo’s trail it was unlikely its driver would have noticed Porter bailing out. The bike sped past. In the same instant, Porter slammed his finger into the trigger of the AK-47, unleashing a hailstorm of bullets. The munitions ripped through the bike. The sound of metal colliding with metal cracked through the still morning air. Porter took a step forward. He kept his finger glued to the trigger, the bullets still rattling out of the barrel of his gun, tracking the target as it moved across the rough surface of the ground. The bike was wobbling. Some petrol had started to leak from its tank, and the driver had taken a couple of bullets to the back, and at least one to the leg. He was hanging on desperately to the machine beneath him: enough of his brain was still working to know that the bike was now his best chance of escaping the attack. But the machine was spinning violently out of control now. The bullets had severed the brake lines, and even though it was losing power fast, the driver had no way of slowing it down as he tried to straighten up and get down the hill. It twisted brutally, and the man no longer had the strength to hold onto its jerking handlebars. He was spun out across the dirt track, while the bike crashed into a rock close to the edge of the road. The front wheel broke off on impact, rolling down the hill, while the rest of the bike fell to the ground, the engine still coughing and spluttering.